Watching this movie, I was put to mind of another film, Mel Brooks' classic "Blazing Saddles." In it, there's a scene where Slim Pickens tells Harvey Korman they should attack a troublesome town by killing the first-born male in every household.
"Too Jewish," Harvey replies.
"The Field" is a film that makes me think of that line, only this time the comment is: "Too Irish." "The Field" is a film in love with the earnest desperation of the Irish plight, of wet weather and the shadow of British tyranny, of being trod upon and subjected to every awful thing on God's green earth, to the point where you are numbed into not caring.
It helps me not care that the protagonist of the film, one Bull McCabe (Richard Harris), is a rather nasty piece of work who takes out his hard life, and the choices he has made in service to it, on every person around him. Harris was a great actor, and his performance is remarkably poignant given the flimsy material he has to work with. Known for his raging on- and off-screen, Harris sucks you in with McCabe's quiet, sullen magnificence, even when he's just eating sandwiches or hammering a nail. Roger Ebert put it best in his 1990 review: "There is no doubting this is a good performance, but in the service of a hopeless cause."
The key problems in this film include a fatally miscast Sean Bean as McCabe's son Tadhg (he's good at projecting hostility, but not of the stupid kind called for here), a pointless central conflict involving an opportunistic American (Tom Berenger, lost with some key lines obviously foleyed in), and a ridiculously ham-fisted conclusion in which Bull finally explodes in unreasoned fury after his criminal activities come a cropper.
It's a shame, because the movie has something going for it early on, with Harris's galvanic performance and some killer visuals from cinematographer Jack Conroy that pull grim beauty from the bogs and rocks of this fictional patch of Ireland called Carraigthomond. I'm sure the original stage play by John B Keane had much going for it, as it seems something of a national treasure, but way too much of whatever was good in it is drowned out here in the overwrought acting and grim moodiness of Jim Sheridan's direction.
Maybe if McCabe's situation was more sympathetic, the story would have more power. Instead, we are pushed into sharing McCabe's narrow viewpoint until it seems to be telling us the great shame we are witnessing is that Carraigthomond is subject to the same laws of man that shape the rest of the world, and that it would be a finer place if only Yanks, priests, widows, and tinkers weren't allowed to wreck their havoc upon it.
"There's another law, stronger than the common law," McCabe tells us. "The law of the land."
Commenters defending this film seem to be saying this is an Irish thing the rest of the world can't understand, that as McCabe would say, "this is deep, very deep." But it's not, really. A guy wants something he can't have, for whatever reason, and reverts to some sloppy terrorism in his anger.
That "The Field" is grim and angry isn't the problem. That it's so grim and angry over something so pointless as three acres of soggy land is.
"Too Jewish," Harvey replies.
"The Field" is a film that makes me think of that line, only this time the comment is: "Too Irish." "The Field" is a film in love with the earnest desperation of the Irish plight, of wet weather and the shadow of British tyranny, of being trod upon and subjected to every awful thing on God's green earth, to the point where you are numbed into not caring.
It helps me not care that the protagonist of the film, one Bull McCabe (Richard Harris), is a rather nasty piece of work who takes out his hard life, and the choices he has made in service to it, on every person around him. Harris was a great actor, and his performance is remarkably poignant given the flimsy material he has to work with. Known for his raging on- and off-screen, Harris sucks you in with McCabe's quiet, sullen magnificence, even when he's just eating sandwiches or hammering a nail. Roger Ebert put it best in his 1990 review: "There is no doubting this is a good performance, but in the service of a hopeless cause."
The key problems in this film include a fatally miscast Sean Bean as McCabe's son Tadhg (he's good at projecting hostility, but not of the stupid kind called for here), a pointless central conflict involving an opportunistic American (Tom Berenger, lost with some key lines obviously foleyed in), and a ridiculously ham-fisted conclusion in which Bull finally explodes in unreasoned fury after his criminal activities come a cropper.
It's a shame, because the movie has something going for it early on, with Harris's galvanic performance and some killer visuals from cinematographer Jack Conroy that pull grim beauty from the bogs and rocks of this fictional patch of Ireland called Carraigthomond. I'm sure the original stage play by John B Keane had much going for it, as it seems something of a national treasure, but way too much of whatever was good in it is drowned out here in the overwrought acting and grim moodiness of Jim Sheridan's direction.
Maybe if McCabe's situation was more sympathetic, the story would have more power. Instead, we are pushed into sharing McCabe's narrow viewpoint until it seems to be telling us the great shame we are witnessing is that Carraigthomond is subject to the same laws of man that shape the rest of the world, and that it would be a finer place if only Yanks, priests, widows, and tinkers weren't allowed to wreck their havoc upon it.
"There's another law, stronger than the common law," McCabe tells us. "The law of the land."
Commenters defending this film seem to be saying this is an Irish thing the rest of the world can't understand, that as McCabe would say, "this is deep, very deep." But it's not, really. A guy wants something he can't have, for whatever reason, and reverts to some sloppy terrorism in his anger.
That "The Field" is grim and angry isn't the problem. That it's so grim and angry over something so pointless as three acres of soggy land is.